Tommee Tippee Steriliser Kit – the One Size Fits All Steriliser!

Although my son was exclusively breastfed for the first 6 months, after I weaned him onto his prescription formula, we needed to upgrade our steriliser. Until then, we got by with using the two bottle travel steriliser which comes in the Tommee Tippee Breastfeeding Kit, but moving up to feeding our son four bottles per day meant that we needed a bigger steriliser like the one in the Tommee Tippee Steriliser Kit.

The Good:

6 bottle capacity

Fits most brands of bottle

Easy to use

Quick 5 minute sterilisation

Contents stay sterile for up to 24 hours

Chemical free sterilisation

The Bad:

Will take up a large space on your worktop

The Details:

First of all, here’s a breakdown of the contents of this kit.

Electric steam steriliser

2 x 150ml Tommee Tippee Closer to Nature bottles

2 x 260ml Tommee Tippee Closer to Nature bottles

6 x milk powder dispensers

Bottle and teat brush

Since the steriliser holds up to 6 bottles, I wouldn’t suggest that a breastfeeding mum would need something of this capacity, however if you are formula feeding, it’s a great purchase.

Electric steam steriliser

The steriliser holds up to 6 bottles, and has a separate tray that sits in the top of the steriliser to hold the teats and lids of the bottles. As a rough guide, six bottles is probably the maximum number of bottles you will be needing to feed your baby from the age of around 1 month old and if you’re really lucky, they may move onto 4 hourly feeds sooner than that. It’s great to be able to sterilise a full day’s worth of bottles all in one go, and since the contents remain sterile for up to 24 hours after sterilisation (provided the lid stays on the steriliser), a common way to use the steriliser is to wash your day’s bottles and sterilise in the evening once your baby is settled.

The steriliser can hold other brands of bottles, not just Tommee Tippee, which isn’t the case with many of the other brands of steriliser on the market. The reason for this is that Tommee Tippee bottles have a wide neck, but are not much shorter than other brands of bottle. This means that other brands can quite happily sit within the bottle holders in the steriliser base. One other brand that I have sterilised and had no problems with is Philips Avent bottles.

The steriliser takes around 5 minutes plus some time to heat up, and you only need to push one button to get it started. The button will light up to indicate that it is switched on, and once it has completed the sterilsation, it turns itself off. You then need to wait a few minutes before you use a bottle, otherwise you run the risk of being scalded by the steam. When you open the steriliser, the lid turns over, and you can then use the inside of the lid as a sterile surface to stand your bottles whilst putting them back together.

One of the benefits of using a steam steriliser is that no chemicals need to be added. The heat of the steam will kill 99.9% of bacteria on the bottles, and your baby won’t be able to taste any faint chemical tastes which may be left behind by using sterilisation tablets.

I have to highlight though that having a steam steriliser can create a bit of an eyesore on your kitchen worktop. They’re not exactly stylish in appearance, and are so large that most people won’t have the cupboard space to put the steriliser away in between uses (and likely wouldn’t have the energy to bother when you know it’s going to be used again tomorrow!). Tommee Tippee have recently redesigned their electric steriliser to be narrower, so that it can sit towards the back of your work surface and not take up the whole space, but you’re still not going to be able to overlook the ugliness or it’s dominance in your kitchen!

Closer to Nature bottles

The steriliser kit comes complete with four Tommee Tippee Closer to Nature bottles. Two in the smaller 150ml capacity size, and two in the standard 260ml, and all come with slow flow teats which are suitable for newborns. The Tommee Tippee Closer to Nature bottles come with many recommendations for being anti-colic and pro-breastfeeding because of their shape making switching from breast to bottle easier. Our son had no dramas with these bottles after the initial bit of fun we had trying to get him to drink from a bottle in the first place! I also find them much easier to clean than other leading brands because of the wide neck of the bottle. The four included bottles will be more than enough for you to get started and see if your baby agrees with this brand of bottle.

Milk powder dispensers

These formula containers are a dream! Tommee Tippee has thought of a great way of making all of their products fit together with one another, for example their cup handles are interchangeable on all bottles and cups, and the milk powder dispensers are another fine example of where they have gone the extra mile with their design process. When you are heading on an outing, you fill a dispenser with the required number of scoops of formula, pop the lid on. The whole container then fits perfectly inside your Tommee Tippee bottles, whether it’s the 150ml or 260ml bottle size. This means it takes up less space in your bag, and also on the small chance that the lid does come off the formula (which never happened to me) then the powder is still contained inside the bottle and won’t be sprayed everywhere inside your changing bag.

The milk powder dispensers hold up to 8 scoops of formula at a time, and can be used separately to Tommee Tippee bottles too, so if you do end up changing bottles it’s not a problem.

Bottle and teat brush

A nice little extra to be thrown into this kit is the bottle brush. Pretty standard and does what it’s supposed to, with the added bonus that you can pull the end off the brush and underneath is a teat cleaner with ridged edges. This can be useful for getting any dried on milk out of the teat.

Overall conclusion

A total must have for bottle feeding parents, it’s just so versatile and fits everything in at once. It’s just a shame that it’s so big and has to sit on your kitchen work surface! Look out for it with a big discount, you can usually pick it up for £40 or less, and even cheaper if you happen to find it in an Amazon Black Friday sale.

I would love to hear in the comments below if you have used this steriliser or the Tommee Tippee bottles and whether you breastfed at all. Please share the article with your friends who are expecting!